Introduction

How should an organization be designed to perform its work? At the most basic level, one can think of an organization as performing a very large task which must be broken down into smaller and smaller tasks in order to get the work done. Suppose you manage a software design company. Should you divide the work into processes such as design, development, sales, and service; or might it be better to divide the work according to client type: individuals, small business, large business, and government? Of course, other options are possible too. Once a firm selects a way to organize the work at the highest level (the big task), there is the question of how work should be divided inside of each of the subtasks. Within subtasks, the work is further divided, until it reaches the lowest task-level of the organization.

Task design is decomposing work into subtasks while considering the coordination among the subtasks to meet organizational goals. Prior to the information age, task design was sometimes called “technology design” by organizational designers. In the traditional setting of manufacturing, technology design was a matter of figuring out whether work should be arranged sequentially (as in assembly lines), in parallel (as in custom building), via teams that continually passed work back and forth among members, or in some other way.